City Adds Sale of MTA Substation Air Rights to Gowanus Rezoning

City officials added the sale of more than a football field’s worth of publicly owned air rights to the Gowanus rezoning application, documents reveal.

Officials plan on hawking 51,000 square feet of newly generated development rights at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Garfield Substation at 276 4th Avenue, near Garfield Place, according to the rezoning’s lengthy Draft Environmental Impact Statement.

According to the documents, the transit power station would remain active, but the sale of valuable air rights newly generated by the rezoning could allow an adjacent landowner to build up, adding that area to their development along the proposed 4th Avenue corridor.

The lot’s current zoning only allows for manufacturing uses.

The Garfield Substation is one of only two so-called dispositions of public property that are rolled into the massive rezoning proposal, which promises to enable the creation of 8,500 new housing units, including some 3,000 income-restricted, rent-regulated apartments, in the gritty neighborhood by 2035.

The other is the much more high-profile Gowanus Green development, which would allow for a 950-unit affordable housing complex on the publicly owned and toxic Public Place site at Smith and 5th streets.

Officials with the Department of City Planning, the rezoning’s lead agency, have widely touted the sale of Public Place as a way to boost cheaper housing in the area sandwiched between wealthy Park Slope and Carroll Gardens in presentations to locals dating back to 2019.

Despite numerous meetings with local Community Board 6 since reviving the rezoning last fall after a pandemic pause, DCP reps did not disclose the Garfield Substation air rights sale until dumping the 26-chapter DEIS — a mandatory document under the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure analyzing potential impacts of the rezoning — on April 19, and presenting the full scale project to the City Planning Commission later that day.

The rezoning was also stalled in court for three months after a group of opponents under the moniker Voice of Gowanus sued the city claiming virtual ULURP meetings amid the pandemic were illegal, but a Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge let officials proceed with some conditions last month.

The roughly 6,000-square-foot lot of the substation is owned by the Department of Citywide Administrative Services and leased to New York City Transit, according to the DEIS.

The city’s quasi-public business boosting arm the Economic Development Corporation requested the air rights sale be included in the Gowanus rezoning, according to the documents.

EDC has overseen other such deals in the recent past, such as the disposition of 98,446 square feet in unusable development rights below the Manhattan Bridge in Dumbo to Rabsky Group for $17.2 million, allowing the Brooklyn company to add that square footage to their mixed-use tower at 69 Adams Street.

A DCP spokesman declined to provide more information on the sale than was already available in the DEIS and an EDC rep did not respond for comment.

An MTA spokesman did not return a request for comment.

The Gowanus rezoning will go before community boards 2 and 6 for a purely advisory recommendation sometime before June 28 as the first step of public input under ULURP.

Editor’s note: A version of this story originally ran in Brooklyn Paper. Click here to see the original story.

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